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20 Products That Failed Even Though They Were Actually Pretty Good

If there's one thing that we've learned about the success of a product - it's that branding has as much, if not more, to do with its success over its quality on any day of the week.

Take a look at Beats headphones, even though there are plenty of better and more affordable options on the market, people go gaga for the headphones. Why? Because their presentation and branding are on point. I remember seeing my first pair of Beats headphones and going, "dayuuumm."

Now, there are some products that have, unfortunately, suffered the opposite fate of the Dr. Dre-promoted sonic ear-wear, as pointed out by these fine Redditors in a recent post. They shared some of the best products that didn't deserve to fail the way they did.

YikYak.

Source: yikyak

YikYak. It was fun in a dumb way and you could talk sh-t and complain anonymously and then they tried to turn it into social media and they killed it.

Disney's Princess and the Frog.

Source: disney

Well I don’t if this counts as a “product,” but Princess and the Frog by Disney was considered a failure because it didn’t make as much money as they had hoped it would. Which was the final push for them to stop making 2D movies

PS Vita.

PS Vita, for f--ks sake it was a portable PS3, it supported most games and had awesome graphics and processing for a handheld device, but Sony didn’t give a shit about it and never realized the good games it was capable of supporting, people weren’t gonna buy a console for 3 good games so it failed, I still got mine :(

These old Wendy's items.

A bunch of Wendy's old menu items, specifically their Spicy Chicken Nuggets, Chicken Strips, and Frosty Milkshakes. I remember I lost 2 teeth on the same chicken strip when I was a kid, it was that good!

EDIT: No people, Wendy's still has regular Frosties (vanilla and chocolate). It's Frosty Shakes that they got rid of.

Dreamcast.

It was the first console in the "6th generation" of consoles. It came out in 1999, a year before the PS2 and two years before the Xbox and GameCube. Because it was the first, it also had the worst specs, compared to those other consoles. At the time, it was a pretty impressive machine.

The biggest flaw with the Dreamcast was the controller. I think if they had changed up the controller it would have had much better success. It had some really good games in its library too, stuff like "Record of Lodoss War." It just had much stronger competition and better systems came out, leading to its failure.

My brother still has his Dreamcast, and aside from the bad controller, we still love the games he had on it.

EDIT: As many have pointed out, there were other big flaws but 7-year-old me just really hated that controller and the cord coming out of the bottom.

The EV1.

General Motors EV1. It was a great electric car with a good range (edit: for its time), and people loved it. It was revolutionary in the 90’s. Then General Motors repo’d all of them and crushed them. It shouldn’t‘ve been a failure. But it was, because GM made it a failure.

"Batter Blaster."

There was a pancake batter in a whipped cream can I used to buy. It was great, you didn’t need to make a ton of batter just to have some pancakes (good for single people and college students), and it used good quality ingredients (and tasty!).

The reason it failed, I think, was because it was sold exclusively though Whole Foods (IIRC), which isn’t the best market for pancake batter in a whipped cream can.

Bounce dryer bars.

Freespace 2.

Freespace 2. It was the greatest space sim of all time, with an amazing story, amazing multiplayer, and phenomenal graphics, but it was released when space sims were on the way out. Volition ended up filing for bankruptcy, and the IP is stuck in legal hell, so no word on if we'll ever get a FS3.

Google Glass.

What are your some of your favorite great products that didn't catch on? For me it's MHP Dark Matter post-workout and the Blueberry Cobbler flavor at Dunkin' Donuts. Actually, it's probably better those donuts don't exist because I'd have multiple limbs amputated from all the diabetes.